Great work Arthurio I did not think anything would survive a blast from cillitt bang, that stuff is so corrosive it's a wonder it did not melt away.
You're got the stacking down to a T from what I can see here.

Hang on... you killed it with Cillit? That's just a little cruel, imho.

May I ask, is that actually a bee? If so, is it a bumble-bee? If so, you should know that the drones (the fluffy males, usually with white arses, who 'bumble' about far from the nest) possess no sting. In this case, you may have murdered a helpless and defenceless, not to mention completely harmless and relatively endangered creature.

Do we have an Asylum CSI? I think we do, I've had visitors to my cell, knocking on my door saying they just want to ask me a few questions about the "hover fly incident", "It shouldn't take long" they say, but I knows they'll say anything to get in.
They said they'll call back later and would I contact them if I have any information about a missing Bee, goes by the name of Bumble?

Seriously, I don't want any living creature to die for my pleasure. The hover fly had chances to escape, but I did limit them I have to say, still, my conscience is clear, if not a little sullied.
Shush gotta go, someone's knocking on my door

For every person on the earth, there are two hundred million insects. More insects can be found in only ten square feet of rainforest than there are people in Manhattan. One square mile of rural land can hold more insects than there are human beings on Earth.

Each year the average person will "eat" several insects while they are sleeping. During the average lifetime, a person consumes about seventy insects and ten spiders during their sleep. According to some sources, beetles have a taste that is similar to apples while wasps taste like pine nuts.

The Department of Health and Human Services has set standards regarding how many insect parts are food can contain, called the Food Defect Action Levels. Chocolate can have up to eight insect fragments per hundred grams, while peanut butter can have only sixty fragments. Meanwhile, wheat flour can have 150 fragments per hundred grams and paprika can have 300 fragments.

Honeybees are more dangerous than snakes. Bees kill more people each year than all the poisonous snakes combined.

The average bed contains between two million to six million dust mites.

Yup - despite the sheer number of insects (greater in biomass by far than the total biomass of all other living creatures on Earth), the humble bee is declining. Of all the insects, they are arguably among the most important to us, as we rely almost exclusively upon them to work their magic and keep our agricultural industries functioning. In other words, bees mean food.

Insects happen to be an excellent source of protein, Blaise, so if the bees should die out, we can always start farming various arthropods as a food source.

In all honesty, you should kill neither a bee nor a wasp. Wasps have their place too, but most importantly, if you should squash a wasp or a bee anywhere near its nest, or a substantial number of its fellow stingers, you'll be risking your life and those of any nearby humans too.

The reason? When wasps/bees sting, they release a pheromone that triggers any nearby (and remember that insects can pick up traces of any scent or pheromone at far, far greater distances than a mere human) wasps/bees to seek out and attack the marked target.

When you squash a wasp or bee, should you rupture its venom sac, you risk releasing much greater quantities of the pheromone into the air.

Back on the subject of bumble bees - the males have no sting, but the females do. However, while the males are out working the fields, the females stay and tend to (guard) the nest. They are exceptionally docile relative to other bees, and it is almost unheard-of for them to swarm... but should you do something daft such as kicking their nest around like a football, I wouldn't expect them to keep their cool.

One day I hope to have a large garden in which I plan to encourage a bumble nest. I absolutely adore them, and look forward every year to their appearance heralding the first days of summer. The reason they appear so early (in the mornings as well as the season) by the way, is that bumble bees are among the very few insects large enough to warm their own blood with muscular activity, so can they rise while most other insects are still incapacitated by the cold.

Strangely enough, though I know that what you are saying WH is supposed to be true, isn't (at least, my observational experiences differ).

I have killed tons of Wasps (Yellow Jackets, to be honest) in my lifetime. I kill them on sight. I have never, ever witnessed others directly nearby becoming violent, or more aggressive as they normally are, when one is killed in their immediate vicinity.

In fact, they just continue as before.

Which makes killing them much easier.

So either they ignore such pheromones, or for some reason do not release them upon death - otherwise I am quite positive that I would have been the victim of many stings many times.

At one bar-b-q I had a small pile of dead Yellow Jackets stacked, just so I could count how many had tried to crash the party - upwards of 40 within 3 hours.

I use various methods to kill them - I prefer the flyswatter, of course. It has the highest kill ration and success chance. The second best is the hand - swat the wasp violently to the ground when it is in flight, and then step on it as it lays their, stunned. Drowning in my beer is the last resort - I hate it when they do that!

Note that I do not kill bees - bees do not tend to invade a picnic or bar-b-q like Yellow Jackets do (and do not aggressively attempt to take part in said activity).

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

Proximity to the nest or hive is key - aggression against a target far from the nest is likely to be wasteful and pointless. The risk of being swarmed increases greatly if you go swatting a bee or wasp within 'scenting' distance of the nest, but I think it less likely for remote drones to get all bothered about it when an attack upon the nest is unlikely. Still, when stinging, bees and wasps both release a pheromone that purportedly increases the likelihood of the target being stung again.

In fact, it's part of the reason for the apparently suicidal behaviour of bees!

When stinging other arthropods, bees actually inject only the required amount of venom to kill or incapacitate their aggressor, and they retain their sting - they live to fight another day, or perhaps, to sting the same target again for good measure. When stinging a large vertebrate (for instance, a careless human or other large mammal attacking the hive) the bee sacrifices itself for the good of the nest. Its sting is anchored into the flesh of the aggressor to that even if the bee is shaken/swiped/pulled off, the sac remains in place, and actually continues to pump (it can be seen to visibly spasm) both venom into the target, and pheromones into the air. Each bee that sacrifices itself ends up pumping several times more venom into the target than a sting-and-run, and so increases the likelihood of the target giving up before the nest has been totally destroyed. Attrition for the greater good.

According to a re-enactment I saw on TV once (so it must be true) one of two British anglers standing on the bank of a river was stung to death within minutes of swatting a bee on his arm. Despite the two of them being within arms-reach of eachother, the man with bee juice all over his arm received a substantially greater number of stings than his companion, and was killed by sheer number rather than intolerance of the venom. They were unlucky - they just happened to be standing in the shade of the tree containing the nest.

I would rather just not swat them than hope that I'm nowhere near a nest when I do.

Still, WS, I would interested to experiment (or have someone else do so while I safely observe their notes - hehe). First, to see if squashing a few early party-crashers increases the likelihood of further crashers turning up (pheromones potentially drawing those 40+ to the site), though this doesn't seem all that likely. Second, to see if wandering drones are more likely to sting, or gather near, a person or object that has been smeared with some venom from a carefully extracted sac.

Personally, I've never been stung by a wasp simply because when everybody else is attracting its attention (and provoking a reaction) by flapping and squealing, I go on about my business. I once even cupped my hands to carry an errant wasp out of my school classroom, seemingly a chivalrous act characterised by a cavelier attitude towards my own safety... but it was actually because I was recovering from an exceptionally unpleasant migraine (11-16 were my worst years) and found the screams of the girls in my class to be unbearably painful. In contrast, a wasp sting would have been nothing - though I'm fortunate I wasn't proved wrong, and released the wasp quite without incident.

Oddly, I've found that talking calmly to unwanted visitors (ie- asking them politely to go somewhere else) tends to work for me. Maybe a certain tone of voice can repel insects by alerting them to the presence of something large that doesn't seem very scared of them (flapping and screaming, on the other hand, provokes an aggressive reaction, and draws them closer for the attack).

My father, apparently, hasn't been so lucky. He was once attacked while working on the roof of a building (no easy escape) when a large number of wasps returned in the middle of the day to find their nest had been frozen and removed (while empty, duh) by inept pest controllers. He told me that they gathered quickly, made some angry noises, then headed straight for him. He was absolutely covered in stings by the time he got down from the roof.

He says this has happened to him more than once, and he's sure that wasps just don't like him very much. A good reason for me not to swat the blighters - they and I seem to have a bit of an understanding. lol
_____

Funnily enough, Blaise, three times I've seen a large fly being eaten by a wasp, and all three times were in the same week but in different parts of the city. There must have been an influx of a particularly tasty type of fly or something. The first one looked as though it was attempting to mount its meal on a train station platform. The fly was dragging itself along the floor with the wasp holding on from behind. Upon closer inspection, the wasp was quite obviously trying to cut the fly in half. The struggle was amazing to watch, and I missed my train in order to see the conclusion of it - it was laborious and messy, but the wasp seemed to think the meal worth the effort.

Until then, I'd thought it was just the whole 'paralysing prey and laying eggs in their bodies' thing that wasps did, but I was amazed to see such a display of outright 'preying'.

Well I've a relevant story, last weekend I helped my Beekeeper father answer a call from a distressed member of our community that had his lunch interrupted by a swarm of bees.

My Dad helps maintain a local apiary and it seems that a swarm had left a hive and jumped the fence to a nearby garden, so as I was visiting home at the time my Dad laid a guilt trip on me to assist him in collecting the swarm.

Off we went with him chuckling away as I was getting more and more worried with thoughts filling my head of being attacked by a whole swarm!

The swarm itself was covering a shrrub growing at the back of the garden and covered and area of about an A3 page, but these bees were tightly packed in together, I've never collected a swarm before but I was still surprised how we went about it.

Basically I held an open cardboard box right up underneath the swarm, I was wearing no protective clothing apart from a beekeepers hat, which included a veil over my face, but otherwise a T-Shirt and trousers. While I was holding the box my dad started shaking the branch the bees were on so that the majority of them fell inside the box, of course what happend next was that my Dad and I were surrounded a bee storm!

However by keeping calm and making sure as many bees as possible were off the shrub we placed the box open end down onto a blanket on the ground with a bottle propping the box up to allow bees to freely enter. By now a few bees were getting very curious and were landing onto my arms, and I had to calmly flick them off, we made sure that there were no more bees slumped together incase they created their own swarm and then carefully walked away.

I still can't believe I didn't get stung once, and my Dad only had one sting on his hand, inspite of the fact that we were inside a swarm of bees they didn't react to this and the one sting was the only casualty of the day.

My Dad returned that night once the bees had collected into the box and cooled down to take them away to their own hive.

Well WH, I don't kill bees - of course, they never crash my Bar-B-Qs, so there is never a need to - and of course most bees are not aggressive (African Bees being an exception, of course). Here in Europe, I would go as far to say that most bees are endangered now (there is a sort of virus going around, killing most of them according to what information I could dig up about it).

I am mainly talking about Wasps here (specifically, Yellow Jackets, but in the US that also includes Hornets - Bald-Faced Hornets, to be exact. They are worse Bar-B-Q and Picnic crashers as Yellow Jackets, and much more aggressive about it). I kill Yellow Jackets on sight. I wouldn't if they didn't insist on inviting themselves to my Bar-B-Qs, but since they do, I kill them. The main reason being that Yellow Jackets, like most Wasps, can sting repeatedly (and will) as well as bite (and they have been known to bite chunks of flesh out of people while stinging repeatedly) and will do so at the drop of a hat (or wave).

As such, Wasps do not have drones like bees do. Or do you mean drones as in worker type insects?

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

I meant drones as in worker-types, or just generally referring to those that wander further from the nest.

Part of my aversion to swatting is an unshakeable reversion to killing any creature, even those I find repulsive.

Then again, I find almost any creature amazing and beautiful in its nature and complexity, from pigs to hornets, and even parasitic worms! I had a mild aversion to moths for a while (especially while in Ireland, where they get bigger than the bats), but cured it by deliberately handling them.

Where I live in London, it seems there is a wasp nest somewhere nearby. Though absent during the winter, the local 'yellow jackets' seem to appear in large numbers in the vicinity of various windows of the local flats during warmer weather. When I first moved in, I was expelling unwanted visitors repeatedly, often waking in the morning to a couple of angry little blighters buzzing around my bed.

No, I didn't get into the habit of handling them. I'm fearless, but not stupid. Hehe.

After a couple of months of harmlessly ejecting them from the premises, they stopped coming in through my window. I would bet the previous occupants swatted them every time!

I know how grave a crime it can be to double post, but I really had to share something.

First, I was mistaken in my belief that wasps swarm. Wasps do not swarm, apparently. I'm not sure that'll change my strategy, as my dad has been stung repeatedly by multiple attackers before - perhaps he sweats wasp PCP...

Second, I found a couple of videos I wanted to share. For those of you who haven't seen it before, the first video is of a small band of hornets pillaging a bee colony. It is of poor quality, but the general story is that half a dozen hornets can ravage an entire bee colony, only to carry away larvae to feed their own. It's not pleasant to watch, but it is compelling. There are other videos around, and I'm sure I saw a good quality one somewhere, once.

The next video is of Japanese honey bees and their surprising reaction to hornets. The phenomenon observed here has been the subject of much debate in recent times. I'm not sure about anyone else, but this video makes me want to cheer the little fellows.

Of course, I meant 'aversion'. I don't want you all thinking I default to murderous behaviour - I've had my electroshock sessions this week already.

Good links, Tao. One of many types of the humble bumbler or bee in these fair isles to have gone the way of the dodo. Thankfully, some six-legged tourists of olde managed to found colonies on foreign shores, and their progeny may well help revive their kind at home again. Not all were so lucky.

I hadn't seen the estimations of the worth of bees before. It puts things in perspective when you try to imagine the cost of hand-pollinating millions of flowers every day.